Second Semester or 2 Fast 2 College!
I'm colleging and gaming and blowing up
2024-02-10
Ruby May Valentine
I just started my second semester of college last month. I’m having a great time! I’m taking an introductory writing course, a math course, and Japanese 102. The schedule this semester has been a lot easier on me than last semester. I take my first two classes in the morning; I have Japanese at night on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so for half the week I’m completely done with classes by 10:50AM. I love it!
Quite a few people from JPN101 are in my 102 class so there’s some familiarity which is nice. I’m learning quite a bit more grammar at a faster pace this semester, and more kanji. We’re starting to learn more casual language too which is a plus, so I’ve been practicing that more online. I’ve been trying to find time to practice with some of the classmates I met last semester, but things keep coming up, but hopefully there will be time soon. Overall, I’m having fun with Japanese still and can’t wait to be able to express myself more with the language.
Writing class has been really great. My professor is very nice and helpful. I also can’t stop writing now. If you head to the new writing section of my website, you can find some short stories I wrote over the last few days. I want to write a novelette before too long but I’m working my way up with smaller pieces of writing first. I eventually want to write full novels but that’s a ways off. The class has made me feel a lot more comfortable with writing now that I understand the rules a bit better. I’m sure I’ll only improve as time goes on.
We got another cat which I somehow failed to mention last time; his name is curry. He’s very cute but quite energetic as he is only 11 months old; we got him in August, so he was about 5 months old at the time. He was quite scared at first which is only natural but he’s quite fond of us now. He meows a lot; we thought pot roast meowed a lot, but curry has him beat for sure. I like the little guy he’s a good cat.
I’ve been playing Like a Dragon 8 which has been an absolute blast. I was a little bummed out at first that there weren’t as many arcade games nor any home console in this one. I quickly forgot after noticing there’s an entire Pokémon/Dragon Quest Monsters game and an Animal Crossing game within Like a Dragon 8. They’ve made some improvements to the turn-based combat as well; area of effect spells are much easier to time now for instance. In Like a Dragon 7, enemies could still move after an AOE spell had been cast, but now they freeze in place once you confirm the spell. It’s a small detail which huge consequences. There’s also plenty of other mini games to keep you entertained if you’re not already overjoyed with the two entire other games they packed into this one. There is also a rogue-like randomly generated dungeon crawler in this one. It’s really nice if you need to level up fast for the next section of the story. I haven’t finished it yet but will do a full write up once I have. Overall, Like a Dragon 8 is the best Like a Dragon game to date.
I’ve also been playing fighting games more after a classmate roped me into playing something called “Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising.” It’s quite a fun game but I remembered I actually do also enjoy games like Street Fighter and Tekken, so I picked up Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8. I haven’t had much time to play them yet, but I already really like them. I want to get better at fighting games. I played an older Street Fighter game against some random guy at the arcade last night; He completely washed me. I’d like to offer at least some challenge to the average cabinet shark at the local arcades so a soft goal this year is to git gud at fighting games.
Due to the infectious energy of my writing class, I want to offer more focused pieces on here about various things I enjoy. If you go to the new writing section of my website, while sparse, you’ll see that there is a tag system. I have to manually implement this and while it is tedious, I do enjoy it. Focused pieces of writing, say about a specific game, will be over on that section of the website going forward. They will have tags that I like to imagine overtime will be quite populated with various writings. You will of course also find my creative writing and various other stories there. The main blog here will continue to be whatever other random shit I want to talk about. I plan to add more navigation to that section of the site soon but for now you can use the “2024” tag to see everything published there so far. Your browser should have back and forward arrows in the meantime.
Thank you for reading! If you have any comments, suggestions, etc., shoot me an email! I’d also love recommendations for anything, music, games, books, pasta shapes, whatever! Have a good one!
-Ruby